This website is intended to provide the measured scintillation properties of many inorganic materials, and citations to the published papers in which the measurements were reported. It is a living document that will grow as additional measurements are published. Please report any errors or omissions to Stephen Derenzo.

It is intended for two main uses:

as a web-accessible reference to useful scintillation detector materials, and

as an aid in developing fundamental theories or empirical relations between basic material properties and scintillation performance. To this end both strong and weak scintillators have been included, as well as those where sensitive measurements have not detected any scintillation emissions. A truly predictive theory must be able to predict both strong and weak scintillators.

Whenever possible, emissions from different mechanisms have been listed separately. These include emissions from luminescent activator ions (e.g. Ce3+, Eu2+), from self-trapped excitons (SX) (e.g. BaF2), from excitons bound to an isoelectronic hole trap (BX) (e.g. CdS:Te), from charge-transfer emissions (CX) (e.g. CaWO4), from core-valence transitions (CV) (e.g. BaF2), and from donor-acceptor recombination (d-a) (e.g. PbI2). In scintillator materials that do not contain a luminescent ion and where a specific emission mechanism has not been reported, the designation self-activated (SA) is used. Materials containing a luminescent ion as a major constituent (e.g. Bi3+ in Bi4Ge3O12 and Ce3+ in CeF3) are listed according to that ion, rather than as self-activated.

All measurements are at room temperature, unless otherwise noted.

Only measurements made with ionizing radiation (e.g. electrons, x-rays, gamma-rays) have been included. Many strongly fluorescent materials are poor scintillators. In these, photons can excite luminescent ions efficiently, but the electrons and holes produced by ionizing radiation are unable to do the same.

Measurements of crystalline powders have been included because: (1) Many scintillation materials are useful in powder form (e.g. x-ray intensifier screens), and (2) A material in powder form can provide a qualitative measurement of the luminosity, and good measurements of the time response and the scintillation emission spectrum. It is hoped that powders with promising data will prompt the production of single crystals that can be used for good measurements of luminosity and proportionality.

Materials with a dominant decay time greater than 10 microseconds have not been included, since these would be less useful in nuclear radiation detectors.

It should be noted that published luminosity values generally increase over time as improved crystals become available.

We regularly scan the Web of Science for articles that contain measured scintillation properties. If you have or know of an article containing scintillator information that has not yet been included below and would like to suggest a candidate material, please send us a copy of the article (the preferred format is PDF). You are also invited to provide information for the different property columns.